Drawings have been used for thousands of years as a means to express, document, analyze, communicate, or build. Advancements in technology have helped advance the making, saving, sharing, and utilization of drawings, while the drawings themselves continue to serve their fundamental purpose.
Due to the necessity of unambiguously representing the complexities and details of industrial designs, especially in the scientific fields of engineering and architecture, drawings have traditionally used organized methods of presenting their subjects in commonly accepted, and well understood, multiple orthogonal projection views such as front, elevation, top, plan, back, side, section and detail views. Other views, such as isometric and perspective, used chiefly for overall presentation, have also been very effective in complementing the orthogonal projection views in describing the designs. These two-dimensional projection views drawn on two-dimensional drawing media such as paper and vellum have traditionally formed the standard bases for preparing industrial design drawings.
With the advent of the first wave of personal computer (PC) technology in the 1980's, and the subsequent, slow birth of application software for bringing that hardware to practical, real world use, attempts at simulating the drawing processes in software were, of nature, based in, and primarily geared toward, the creation and development of the basic two-dimensional orthogonal projection views. The heavy demand placed on the hardware by graphics was also a significant factor in influencing the development and evolution of such design software.
Today, even though personal computer hardware and software have advanced generations beyond their ancestors from the 1980's in both capabilities and performance, much of the software leading the computer-aided design industry still relies on drawing methods and techniques founded in the creation of original two-dimensional projection views, albeit presented in fast, colorful, three-dimensional space on computer monitor screens. The use of two-dimensional drawing planes, or work planes, however freely oriented in three-dimension space, and uniformly spaced prescribed grids of lines and points on such work planes, and however freely oriented on such work planes, while functionally adequate, fundamentally represents a horizontal extension of the pre-PC drawing thought processes now executed on modern PCs. Geometry creation for real world three-dimensional objects is treated by thinking of them as a series of two-dimension sections.
It would be advantageous to have a method and system that enables one-dimensional, two-dimensional, and three-dimensional drawings to be made directly in three-dimensions on a computer monitor or other visual display device without having to first create two-dimension drawings and then project them into three-dimensional views.